Speed Endurance

The purpose of speed endurance is to prolong
the amount of time at which a near optimal speed can be maintained.
This is particularly useful for sprinters, but will be of benefit to
those running longer distances as well.

Again technique is important here, with relaxation being of prime
importance because once the athlete starts to "tighten up" the
degradation of speed is accelerated.

It is often useful for you to
think about running as "tall and relaxed" as possible, with the
height being attained by maintaining the level of the hips as high
as possible.

The range of these sessions for sprinters will
usually be runs of between 6 and 30 seconds where there is nearly
complete recovery between each of the runs (particularly if they are
near the upper limit of this time).

However, for longer distance runners this can be increased to up
to about 3 minutes, provided there is good recovery between the runs.
A marathon runner, for example, would view 1000m repetitions at
their 5000m race pace as speed endurance.

Regardless of the type of
runner, a typical session may consist of, say, 5-7 repetitions with
about 2-3 minutes recovery for distance runners and about 5-8
minutes for sprinters.